I was given a WD Passport for Mac today by a fellow who says he was tired of
trying to get it to work. I took it home and hooked it up, and experienced the
most bizarre symptoms.
The drive showed up on the bus, whether FW800 or USB, exactly the same way.
There was no "couldn't mount" message, but the volume wasn't mounted. However,
the volume's name showed up correctly in Disk Utility, only in gray. When I
asked Disk Utility to mount the volume, it said there was something basic wrong
with it, and it needed repair. When I attempted to repair it, it would say,
"Unmounting volume" and then just spin forever.
Disk Warrior immediately complained about the disk, saying that it couldn't
mount it (or maybe it was dismount it, I forget) and eliminated itself entirely
from consideration as a recourse.
Drive Genius 3 scanned the whole drive at 100% good, zero bad blocks, but when
asked to initialize it did the same thing Disk Utility did when asked to repair
or initialize it: it hung unmounting it. Same for native diskutil in Terminal.
After Googling a bit, I learned that WD had a drive diagnostic tool available
for Windows, so I booted up Windows and downloaded it. It said the drive was
hunky dory -- of course, Windows didn't have any way to mount the volume. The
diagnostic tool offered a choice to zero out the first and last million disk
records, so I chose it. When I rebooted OS X, shazam -- the OS complained that
the drive needed initialization, and Disk Utility had absolutely no problem
initializing it.
My first thought was, perhaps the entire drive was encrypted. But I can
guarantee you the fellow who gave me the drive doesn't have the chops to do
this himself. Then I thought, WD has a drive management suite that comes with
their drives that knows how to do this, and some of their drives have actual
hardware support for it. But this drive (a WD5000MT) doesn't have that
capability or work with that suite.
Any ideas as to what would cause a drive to act this stupidly?
--
Macs R We -- Personal Macintosh Service and Support
in the Wickenburg and far Northwest Valley Areas.
http://macsrwe.com
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